Re: Why we really can't use Facebook for technical discussion.

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 6/7/21 8:16 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:

> What we have here is the predictable result of a company that failed 
> to take moderation seriously and is now desperately throwing 
> technology at a problem rather than fixing the core problem that they 
> designed their environment to maximize conflict because that was most 
> profitable for them.

As much as I hate FB (I left the platform in 2016 and have never looked 
back) I think "failed to take moderation seriously" glosses over a 
number of inherent problems with social media, particularly when done on 
a large scale.

One is of course that human moderation is time-consuming and therefore 
expensive if the moderators are paid.  It's also hard for a large number 
of human moderators (required to deal with large volumes of users and 
traffic) act uniformly.   On another widely used platform the moderators 
are almost completely arbitrary, despite supposedly enforcing a common 
set of clear standards.   So it's not surprising if social media 
platforms resort to algorithms.   And of course the algorithms are 
flawed because AI is a long way from understanding the many subtleties 
of human interaction.

Unpaid human moderators can be even more capricious than paid humans, 
because the desire to impose one's own prejudices on others is a strong 
motivator of volunteers.

Even under the best of conditions moderation (whether done by humans or 
machines) is dangerous both because it can easily squelch valuable 
input, and because it's often easily gamed for that purpose by people 
for whom such input is inconvenient.     No matter how noble the intent, 
the effect of moderation is often to favor established prejudices, or 
worse, to enable bullying.

I don't claim to know the solution, but I don't think it's a simple 
matter of "taking moderation seriously".

Keith